More Blender thoughts and Bed Jumping

I’ve been battling what I’m pretty sure is strep throat for a day and a half now. Unfortunately a combination of extremely crappy sleep and my poor excuse for a desk chair have conspired to give me the gift of a major back ache at the same time. Oh joy.

Tonight I turned to Blender for a little distraction (do you know I have been able to go about 15 full minutes with nary a painful swallow?). One of the first things Troy Sobotka suggested to me was having a screencast to show how to set up the Blender video sequencer for more efficient editing, and in the process give people some insight into the customizability and power of the Blender interface. The main problem with that is I am not all that familiar with the Blender interface. So I’m trying to use it in more little projects and get accustomed to it.

I did manage to get it laid out somewhat like Troy had suggested to me, with the most frequently used tools in places that make sense:

I’m thinking that the next screencast I do will show the novice Blender user how to go from the default Blender Video Sequencer window layout into something like I’ve shown in the screenshot.

I’ve also posted up another little diddy using footage that I shot with my Flip camera on a tripod (although being a complete novice, I moved the tripod slightly during the filming duhhh). The one thing I was trying a few times to get right was applying slow motion to a single clip. I used this wiki page as a reference for achieving that effect, but I still kept having problems getting things to pick up full speed at the end of that segment. More to learn I guess… Anyway, here’s what I came up with very quickly. I didn’t include the slo-mo clip, I just wasn’t happy with it. It’s a short little flippy video thing. The sort of thing I wanted a video editor on Linux to do quickly for me. Blender is making me so happy these days. Now if it could only cure strep throat and massage my back. ;)

Update: Video now revised to show one segment in slo-mo. Thanks heathenx!